When the NHI card component becomes an backdoor for hackers
time
01:10 ~ 01:55
site
R3
Three vulnerabilities were found in the Taiwan National Health Insurance (NHI) card involving Race Condition, Stack Overflow, and Heap Overflow.
NHI cards need to interact with card readers for authentication. As browsers do not support such functionality, the local device will utilize Web Services for authentication. Security surrounding the Web Service implementation then becomes particularly critical as poor practices pose a severe threat to the local device as well as the NHI card itself.
In 2022, these three vulnerabilities pose an even greater threat to Taiwan as the widespread use of the NHI card has only increased due to the pandemic. Vaccine registration systems needed to rely on NHI cards for authentication.
In this presentation, we will discuss how the NHI’s architecture allowed these vulnerabilities to happen, how these potential threats were detected, take you step-by-step through our in-depth analysis, and show how a heap overflow led to successfully achieving RCE in Linux.
Since our discovery, we have since been in contact with manufacturers and have collaborated on patching these particular vulnerabilities to reduce further risk to users.
